How to Boost Your Career and Salary on LinkedIn (with Donna Serdula)

Summary

In this episode, Anthony welcomes Donna Serdula to the show. Donna has pioneered in the profile optimization in LinkedIn and wrote the book, LinkedIn Profile Optimization for Dummies. She currently provides services and coaches for LinkedIn optimization. Tune in as Donna lectures us everything about LinkedIn plus the bonus resources she’s dropping at the end of the show to help us get started.

Link and Resources

Unsplash and Canva – Websites where you can get good background graphics

Contact

Call or text 212-401-2990 if you’d like to work with Anthony (or any of our guests).

Full Transcript

ANTHONY: Hey everyone, today we’re gonna talk about how you can boost your career and actually, more importantly, your salary just on LinkedIn. I’m talking with a real expert on the field, I’m joined by Donna Serdula. Hey Donna, thanks for joining me.

DONNA: Thanks for having me.

ANTHONY: So let me give my little intro because Donna is a real expert on LinkedIn. So I think it’s fair to say that she pretty much pioneered the concept of LinkedIn profile optimization, which I guess is like the LinkedIn version of SEO, which is awesome by the way. She also literally, literally wrote the book on LinkedIn, actually several books but the book is the LinkedIn Profile Optimization for Dummies, which is that whole series that everyone is so familiar with and lastly, she is currently offering coaching and sort of LinkedIn optimization services for all of us. And you can go to linkedin-makeover.com to check that out. So you know what, this is all really, there’s just so much stuff we need to go over so I’m just gonna dive right in if you don’t mind. So let’s start by just talking about LinkedIn and your LinkedIn profile in general. So I don’t know if you remember, maybe I’m aging myself a little bit here. I remember when LinkedIn was like this, oh yeah, you kind of throw up your your resume up there and it’s whatever, that’s how it used to be in the beginning. Is that how it still is now and if not, what’s LinkedIn all about these days?

DONNA: If you’re doing it wrong it’s still exactly the same but ultimately, I had the exact same experience, Anthony because I joined back in 2005 and back then, everyone was like you gotta get on LinkedIn, that’s this amazing website, you get tons of opportunities and I could not wait. I got home to my big computer and typed typed linkedin.com and I remember when I created that account, it presented me with a LinkedIn profile and who knows a what a LinkedIn profile was. It looked a lot like my resume so I got out my old dry, dull out-of-date resume, and I just copied and pasted the fields from the one document and I thought I did a great job, leaned back, waited for opportunity to hit and nothing happened. And I thought LinkedIn was this huge waste of time but fast forward, I started to realize I was in a different field, I changed jobs, no thanks to LinkedIn, let me just tell you and I now had this big territory; I was selling technology, software and I was cold calling and I was like calling over and over again, people all over. And each time I’d go to call, I would check them out, online and the first result was almost always the LinkedIn profile. And I remember this one particular time, it suddenly dawned on me, just as I was checking everybody else out, they were most likely googling me and checking me out. And here I am, I’m trying to showcase myself as this executive, this thought leader, someone who could solve their problems and they’re looking at my LinkedIn profile and it’s that dull dry out-of-date resume that doesn’t explain me in any way. And I realized, that’s when I had my epiphany, oh my gosh, your LinkedIn profile is not your resume! It’s who you are, it’s your career future. It’s not your professional past and you really need to put yourself out there in this amazing way that attracts opportunities and as soon as I had that realization, I started to optimize my profile and I realized it’s a place to write your story, to tell your story, who you are, how you help people and when you do that, amazing opportunity hits you.

ANTHONY: That’s totally different from what I, and probably a lot of people, think of LinkedIn as. So that’s really, I can’t wait to hear more.

DONNA: So like right now, if you said to someone, what’s LinkedIn, they’d say oh, it’s like Facebook but for professionals and there’s truth to that. And LinkedIn is really trying hard to get people to go there and to read that LinkedIn feed, to read the posts, to comment, to share and they want that type of a social networking environment. But we also have to recognize that LinkedIn is a database. It’s a database of professionals for professionals. And if a person is searching, if there is a recruiter out there looking for someone, they don’t always know that person’s name but they know the core responsibilities, they know their strengths, they know their abilities that person should have and they take those keywords and they put them into LinkedIn. And they’re looking for a person who matches. If you have an empty profile or just a profile that is out of date, that’s been copied and pasted, you’re not gonna be popping up for these opportunities.

ANTHONY: That’s fascinating that you mentioned keywords, so it’s kind of like it’s very similar to SEO in that way but instead of, I guess the entire universe of Google searchers, you’re really targeting job opportunities or recruiters or whoever might be typing into LinkedIn from the search perspective, that’s interesting.

DONNA: Exactly, yes! And here’s the thing, we often think of oh, I need a professional services person, I need a lawyer, I need a realtor. A lot of times you put that into Google and you get these websites, you get pages about, you get so much, you get inundated with millions of hits. A lot of people are realizing they type in realtor or a lawyer in LinkedIn, not only are they getting a list of people that they know or people that people within their network know, they’re only getting people. They’re not getting all of the other stuff. So people are going to LinkedIn because it’s more targeted. They know they’re going to get professionals and companies and none of that other garbage that Google is going to pull up.

ANTHONY: Very true, very true.

DONNA: So it’s not just for jobs, it’s for opportunities, all types of opportunities. You could use it for prospecting but you can also get it for inbound hits, people who want your services.

ANTHONY: It seems to me like we’re talking about, in this part of the conversation, we’re talking about self-employed or small business individuals. So can we narrow this down a little bit, is there a particular field or type of person for whom LinkedIn is really important?

DONNA: Yes, if your business is based upon connections, if you have a network, if what you do, if you’re just intersecting with other people in some way, shape or form, huh! That’s everybody but it is very much, it is corporate, it is professional, B2B works really great within the LinkedIn realm but I hate to say that because even B2C, it’s not so much that you’re getting your clients involved, but even when you have a B2C type of business, you still have vendors, you still have partners, you still have to recruit, you still have other people within that professional corporate world that are interested in knowing more about you.

ANTHONY: Donna, are you familiar with BNI at all?

DONNA: Yes, I am! I was a member of BNI for a short period of time. I was also a member of LeTip for a short period of time.

ANTHONY: Okay, so for anyone who’s not familiar, BNI, I think it stands for Business Networking International and it’s the sort of system, where in cities or neighborhoods, you have these networking groups, regularly scheduled; usually very early, which is kind of a pain but and you have members of all sorts of different cross sections and there’ll be one attorney, one real estate guy, one doctor, I’m just laying that sort of groundwork for folks who are not familiar with it. My question, Donna, is how would you compare the traditional BNI method of networking with what you can accomplish on LinkedIn?

DONNA: Well, unlike BNI, you can network in your pajamas on LinkedIn. You can even have a glass of red wine next to you if you so choose. There’s a similarity to it. Of course, it takes it online but when you think of BNI, one of the nice parts about it is, and like I said, I had done BNI, I had also done a similar one called LeTip and it’s referring and people love referrals. Oh, I need a doctor. Well, I know this doctor, he’s great, he’ll help you and you feel more comfortable because there was that introduction, you had that mutual connection and the beauty with LinkedIn is it does the same thing. LinkedIn is based upon three degrees of connection, three degrees and what that means is when you do a search, you are searching your Linkedin Network, your first-degree connections, your second-degree connections and your third degree connections and when you look at those search results, you’re going to see numbers next to these people’s names. If you see a number one, that means you’re directly connected. You know each other. Someone sent the other one an invite and that person accepted. There’s a direct connection. Then anyone in that person’s network is considered a second-degree connection because you have this mutual connection in common and then third degree is you take it one step further out. So if a person is looking for a lawyer, a doctor, a realtor, someone and they put that keyword into the LinkedIn search, the results; they can see who do they know directly or who do they know that knows someone. And you can ask for that introduction. You can feel a little bit better knowing that someone that you know knows that person. And it warms it up, it gives you a more feeling of trust to that person.

ANTHONY: This kind of draws on one of Robert Cialdini’s six principles of influence. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that. It’s a very famous book on influence and persuasion and basically, one of them is social proof, meaning if your friends or folks you know approve of something or someone, it’ll nudge in that direction so yeah, like you’re saying, you know for sure. If you know that your friends or your friends of friends are connected to somebody, it’ll make that much more of a comfortable introduction for sure.

DONNA: Now let’s take it to the next level. Now let’s say so this person now feels okay, I’ve got a couple people that look really interesting, let me check out their profiles. And you check out the first profile, and the person just copied and pasted a dull boring resume, the other person has like just a bare-bones profile, you’re not even sure if the person still alive or not and then this third person tells a really authentic, vibrant story about who they are and why they do what they do. They talk about how they love helping their clients, they talk about the change that they’ve brought into other people’s lives. You can see their the trajectory of their career, how they started off you know maybe in the mailroom and they’ve they’ve progressed, wow, wow! I wanna work with this person, I feel like I get them, I know who they are! Just remember to put your phone number in your profile, guysso people can reach out.

ANTHONY: I got to admit, all these tips that you’re mentioning, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a profile written that way. So it’s definitely a unicorn out there.

DONNA: You have to check out my clients’ profiles.

ANTHONY: I think we should, that would be an excellent way of seeing the difference between, I guess the traditional profile which is your eyes kind of just glaze over versus something that’s more optimized.

DONNA: And think of those poor recruiters who are scanning through hundreds of dull, boring, just inane profiles and then they see this gem, this one that actually speaks to them and there’s a warmth of a personality there, who is going to get the phone call? But I will tell you this, if you visit my website, linkedin-makeover.com, there’s like a black navigation bar and smack dab, in the middle, it says profile examples, you click that button, we tweet out almost, not the confidential ones but almost all of the profiles that we optimize, we tweet out and we have a steady stream and you can go in and see what these profiles look like. I don’t want anyone to plagiarize, please no plagiarism but you can really get inspired by what we’re producing. There’s a beauty in really one and this is something my clients tell me all the time, it’s being able to reflect and think about who you are, why are you on LinkedIn, who is your target audience, what is it that you want, what is your message and putting it out there and when you do, when you showcase your best, you attract the best. There’s something about just putting it forward and people are hungry, they’re hungry for the why, they’re hungry to know who you are and why you do what you do and when you give it to them, good things happen.

ANTHONY: Have you read The Secret?

DONNA: Yeah.

ANTHONY: Yeah, I think I kind of got gist of that but yeah, I love that book as well or that philosophy, I’m not sure what to call it.

DONNA: I don’t know what to call it either but I just went to tut.com, have you ever been there.

ANTHONY: I don’t wanna take this too far offtrack, I just wanna let you know, law of attraction, I’m with you.

DONNA: There is, a lot of times and this is one of the, there were a few things that came to me as I built this business I started in 2009. And one of the first things that really surprised me were the high level people who were attracted to the service of hiring someone to help them write about themselves, write this LinkedIn profile. And the first thing I realized is it doesn’t matter what a great writer you are, what a deep thinker you are, nothing, nothing matters because it’s always hard to write about yourself.

ANTHONY: But, I mean even pulling it back a second, there aren’t very many good writers out there just to begin with.

DONNA: That is true, it’s hard to write, it’s even harder to write about yourself but what I also found is so few people really approached their life and their career strategically. And we really do, we force people to say why, why are you doing what you’re doing, what are you getting out of it? And it amazes me, everyone has a to-do list. And every day, well maybe not everybody, but the high performers, typically, have a to-do list and every day there’s scratching off all of their accomplishments and as they scratch them off, they forget about them and you forget the value that you’re bringing. I say stop scratching off those items from your to-do list, you gotta remember them, you got to put them into another notebook because this is who you are, it’s the value that you provide and it’s so hard when people come to me and say hey, I need that resume, I need that LinkedIn profile. Well, what have you done? I can’t remember.

ANTHONY: I mean, here’s what I’m hearing: it sounds like your service at linkedin-makeover.com you’re kind of doing three things, so the SEO knowledge or LinkedIn optimization knowledge is just sort of the technical side of it but that’s really only the tip of the iceberg from what I’m hearing. You’re also delivering storytelling skills that most people do not, just flat-out don’t have. And on top of that, not only are you delivering great storytellers but there are also biographers, in a way, right? I mean this is a lot that you’re providing for people.

DONNA: We’re helping people understand where they’ve been, who they are, where they’re going, how to articulate that professional story. And once they do so, they get confident, they get excited. I often say and people are always like how is this possible when our service changes people’s lives. Opportunities flood in, things that they never thought would happen happen. I’ve said it before but when you showcase your best, you attract the best. It’s just the way it is.

ANTHONY: Let’s swing the pendulum to the other side just for a moment just because it could be funny. Today, in 2018, just how bad is it, how bad is it for you and for your career if you have no picture and pretty much a blank profile or no profile at all on LinkedIn?

DONNA: People are going to assume you’ve done nothing. They’re also going to question your relevance in this world.

ANTHONY: Or maybe that you have no tech abilities whatsoever.

DONNA: Exactly, exactly, I remember, it was a few years ago, I was reading this article. I think it was, it might have been like the New York Times, it might have been Wall Street Journal but they were talking about age discrimination and they had this this executive from an advertising agency who had just been laid off and he was in his late 60s and he was in this interview, he was like just moaning how the age discrimination was so terrible and he was laid off so unfairly and he couldn’t find any work, nobody wanted him. And I thought to myself, this is really interesting. So I grabbed his name and I put it into LinkedIn to look at his LinkedIn profile. The picture showed this dull lifeless man.

ANTHONY: Oh, but he actually had a picture, okay, that’s–

DONNA: Oh, he did have, yes, which yes, is kind of good but it did not workto him in any way. He looked dull, he looked lifeless. The resume wasn’t even a resume. It was like this bare-bones profile. It didn’t convey anything, there was no vitality, there was no enthusiasm. He definitely didn’t even seem relevant to this time and I thought is this age discrimination or is this branding?

ANTHONY: Bringing it back to the picture for a second, have you ever, I mean it definitely sounds like you advocate getting a good headshot done.

DONNA: I advocate going to a professional photographer, getting into that studio and really getting a great one taken because this is how you appear to the world.

ANTHONY: So one tip that I’ve heard and tell me tell me your thoughts as the expert because professional headshots can be pricey, so one hack that I’ve heard of was to find, there are a lot of these shops that do Tinder headshots, if you know what tinder is.

DONNA: I do. I didn’t know that there was, they did Tinder headshots, I never heard of that.

ANTHONY: There’s guys or photographers whose whole business is making you look fabulous and sexy for Tinder.

DONNA: See, here’s the problem, you don’t want that glamour shot on LinkedIn. It can hurt you. I mean, you wanna look great and you wanna look vibrant but you do wanna look professional so you I’d say to men and women, well, to women and men alike, no cleavage.

ANTHONY: What’s wrong with some male cleavage? Come on.

DONNA: You do have to be careful. Like just today, so one of my clients said to me, “Donna, I’m looking for a headhunter “who specializes in logistics.” And I pulled up a list, I went to LinkedIn, I did an advanced search, I pulled up all of these headhunters. And the one, the person looked like Kim Kardashian. At first, I was like, “Is this Kim Kardashian’s photo?” No, she just looks like Kim Kardashian. But it made me pause because I wasn’t sure is this a real profile or not. So you gotta be careful, you gotta be careful.

ANTHONY: Let’s jump into some of the more nitty-gritty, sort of tactics type questions which I’m sure will be of tremendous value for some of our listeners. And let’s start off with just what are some of the most common mistakes people make when they’re writing their profiles?

DONNA: Well, I already mentioned this but I’ll say it again because I don’t think I can say it enough, do not copy and paste your resume.

ANTHONY: Okay, but why, I mean I think I know why but let’s let’s spell it out.

DONNA: Let’s go off of two, so one, let’s say you’re looking for a job and you copy and paste your resume. And let’s say someone finds it and thinks you look fantastic and they’re really impressed and they request your resume because they wanna learn more about you and you send them exactly the same information they just read, they’re gonna be a little disappointed. So you wanna think about it as building, you wanna build. Plus, the other thing is a LinkedIn profile is public, anyone and their brother can see it. You’ve gotta be careful with what you put out there. You don’t wanna have confidential information or information about your clients that you don’t want everyone to see. So you’ve gotta be very careful because it is public but let’s say you’re looking for clients and you copy and paste your resume but your goal isn’t to find a job. It’s to find new clients and what you’ve just given them is just your professional past. It doesn’t align to your goal because you always need to think of why am I on LinkedIn, what are you trying to accomplish. And then you need to think about your target audience, what do they need to know and a resume is not any information that they need to know.

ANTHONY: Let’s speak to our listeners who are in the corporate world, in the W-2 world. So their audience is who, is it the recruiters, the hiring managers?

DONNA: It could be, it could be their colleagues, it could be the the executive team, it could be that they’re calling in to vendors and it’s those vendors that are their target audience, it could be the stockholders of the company. Who are they talking to? Who is most likely gonna be checking them out?

ANTHONY: Another nitty-gritty question for you and this is actually something that I, personally, don’t really quite get either so you’ll be helping me out; what are these endorsements and what’s the point of them? Because people have endorsed me and I was like okay, what is this? Can you first like just describe what it is?

DONNA: Well there are recommendations and then there are endorsements. A recommendation on your profile is like an actual paragraph that a person wrote, a real recommendation and those things, I think are just wonderful and beautiful. And it doesn’t matter who you are, you should have as many recommendations as you can.

ANTHONY: So as a practicing attorney, that would be like the equivalent of a testimonial?

DONNA: Yes, yes, exactly. And it’s proof, it’s perfect proof. So that is a recommendation. The problem is like we already discussed, writing is hard. So LinkedIn, in all its wisdom, decided to do something a little easier and they introduced endorsements and endorsements, it’s like having a skill and a person giving you a thumbs up on that skill like hey, he’s great with business development. He is perfect with strategic relationships, thumbs up. What makes it work is that it’s super easy, you just click it and that’s the endorsement. The other nice thing about it though is for LinkedIn. Recommendations are fantastic but it’s all this content. If LinkedIn wants to know hey, this person is looking for business development and this profile has 300 people endorsing them for business development, there seems to be a bit of a match here and so it helps in the search results.

ANTHONY: But here’s something that happened in my personal experience, I’ve had friends and colleagues endorse me for things that I don’t do, I guess they’re trying to be helpful or they don’t understand what I do.

DONNA: That might have been a while ago. Right now, you can only be endorsed for those specialties that are listed on your profile. So it’s skills, they used to call it specialty skills. So you can only be endorsed for the skills that you yourself have put on your profile.

ANTHONY: That’s how I think it should have been from the beginning because I was so confused when I was getting all these weird endorsements.

DONNA: Well, it is but here’s the thing, sometimes though it’s worth seeing what you’re getting endorsed for because that’s an eye-opening experience. I found I was getting endorsed for motivational speaking and I’m like this is insane, I’m not a motivational speaker but you know what, guess what, apparently, my talks are motivational but it wasn’t something that I saw but it was something that I was able to recognize just because enough people were endorsing me for it back then.

ANTHONY: So let’s say there’s a endorsement or skill that you want to be known for, that’s really what you’re pushing for at this stage of your career or life, what’s a good strategy to get more endorsements in that area or in general?

DONNA: So one, make sure that that skill is listed on your profile, reorder it so it’s at the very, very top so it’s one of the first three, the featured skills and you can reorder them. So make sure that you put that up there. And then what you wanna do is make sure you start endorsing other people because then they’re going to feel that need for that quid pro quo and they’ll just go back to your profile and they’ll look at the first three and they’ll endorse you for those top three.

ANTHONY: Reciprocity, that’s another one of the social influences.

DONNA: That works really well and then the other thing you can do is just take the bull by the horns and create a mass message on LinkedIn, include all your friends and colleagues and people that you like and just say hey, I’m really trying to deepen my Linkedin impact and I would love for you to endorse me for these three skills if you so believe that they’re reflected within the value that I’ve provided and you’d be surprised at how many endorsements you’ll get.

ANTHONY: It never hurts to ask, yeah?

DONNA: Doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t hurt.

ANTHONY: Especially, these are people who are your connections basically.

DONNA: Let me tell you, I have a pet peeve when it comes to endorsements and that is I’ll see someone who’s like a lawyer and I’ll look at their profile and their top three featured skill sets, Microsoft Wordlike the first one.

ANTHONY: What?

DONNA: And it’s like, guys, take that off or at least drop it to the very bottom. It’s just one of those things. Take off Microsoft Office, everyone has that skill set now and if you don’t, you shouldn’t be a professional.

ANTHONY: You actually see that. What about as a skill like doing email? That’d be great.

DONNA: I haven’t seen that one but that would be really funny. I’m sure someone has it on theirs somewhere, somewhere in this crazy world.

ANTHONY: Why don’t we give the listeners something to do, let’s give them a little bit of homework. Can you give us… What are three things that our listeners can do right now or right after we get off that would immediately improve their profile?

DONNA: Number one, your headline, it’s right underneath your name and this is your tagline and it follows you all over LinkedIn. So if you’re messaging someone, if you’re connecting to someone, if you’re posting, if you’re commenting, that headline is right there. It’s your picture, your name and that headline. That headline, by default is just your job title and current company which is not a great headline. A headline should beckon you, it should should compel a person to wanna click to read more. It should give them a better understanding of who you are and what you do. So I would say the very first thing that anyone should do here is really make sure their headline shines. And I have, on my website, so if you go to linkedin-makeover.com and you click on Resources, I think it’s like the first or second item on the drop list, I have my Linkedin Headline Generator and it’s a free online app. It creates a headline for you, you just input a couple of terms, choose a couple symbols and you hit generate and it spits out a really attractive, really compelling Linkedin headline that you can copy-paste and you’re gonna get more views to your profile, you’re also going to turn up in search more often because that’s a highly, highly sensitive area.

ANTHONY: You say that’s a free tool on your website?

DONNA: It’s super easy, it’s just like five clicks but you’re going to get something and here’s the thing and you could kind of go back and play with it so you can keep manipulating it but you can really play and come up with a tagline that works and it works great.

ANTHONY: Donna, you promise it’s good, right? It’s not like a Mad Lib where it’s gonna be like Anthony likes to eat bananas, whatever?

DONNA: I can’t lie, my old 1984 ad-lib books did in fact imbue a portion of this. It is intelligent, it is logical so I think you’ll find that it extends beyond the Mad Libs.

ANTHONY: Okay, so that’s number one. Fix that headline and go to Donna’s website to get it fixed, use her free tool. What’s the next immediate takeaway to just immediately fix your profile?

DONNA: Oh gosh, it’s so obvious to say the profile picture but it does… All right, you know what, everyone knows that. That one’s a gimme so I’ll say your background graphic. So if you look at your LinkedIn profile and the background image looks like a blue-green constellation, that means you have not uploaded a background graphic. You’ve gotta fix that. So what you wanna do is upload an image that reflects your brand. It illustrates who you are and how you help others. You could certainly grab imagery from your website if you want to or you could say you know what, I wanna be seen as someone who does insurmountable tasks so go to unsplash.com and find a picture of a person climbing a mountain and upload that or maybe you think, oh I wanna be seen as someone who’s really wise, upload a picture of an owl soaring. Maybe you’re a person who sheds light and illuminates, find a picture of like a lighthouse or a beacon in the darkness and upload that.

ANTHONY: Another good resource for that is, I’m not sure if you use this Donna, is a website called canba.com, C-A-N-B-A.com. They have a library of a lot of free photos, there’s paid options as well but there’s a bunch of free photos and it also will give you templates or canvases for the exact correct dimensions for LinkedIn and then if you’re doing other stuff too like Twitter or Facebook, Instagram so it’s really helpful in that you’ll know exactly what it’ll look like on LinkedIn.

DONNA: And I will also say, within my resources, I also give away like hundreds of background graphics. So you can check that out, that’s also right near where I have the Headline Generator but I love Canba. I love unsplash.com because unsplash.com has beautiful, beautiful photographs.

ANTHONY: Those are royalty-free?

DONNA: Royalty free, free to take.

ANTHONY: Last one, last homework immediate improvement on your profile for Joe average LinkedIn.

DONNA: As much as I want to say write a summary or really work on showcasing your trajectory, those things are kind of hard so we’re gonna go with something that’s a little bit more of a quick hit. And what I’ll say is this put your contact information throughout your LinkedIn profile. Make sure that in the contact information fields, yes, you’ve got a phone number, you’ve got an email and people can see it. The other thing though is put your name, your email and your phone number in your summary, your Linkedin summary and put it at the bottom of your current experience and the reason why I say that is you never know when a person who’s going through your profile is going to be so impressed that they’re gonna be like I wanna reach out to this person.

ANTHONY: That’s interesting, there’s a lot of platforms that don’t allow you to do that, they limit where you can put what’s detected as a phone number or an email but LinkedIn’s okay with that?

DONNA: LinkedIn is totally okay with it.

ANTHONY: Everyone, write this down, make sure you’ve got these. These are the three quick hits to immediately and these are free tips that Donna’s giving you so you gotta send over your thank-you vibes, please. Fix your headline and you can go over to linkedin-makeover.com to get to use her tool to get that done. Secondly, fix your, or at least have a background image and we’ve talked about Unsplash or Canba and then lastly, we just talked about include your call to action which is basically your phone number or your email, pretty much everywhere, is that right?

DONNA: Yeah, I mean, never be obnoxious, never be obnoxious but I wouldn’t put in your headline. I would put it in the summary. I’d put it in your current experience and if you wanna go back into time, you can also put it into your previous experiences but at least in your summary and your current experience, have your name, like repeat it, which I know is silly but it’s also another way of optimizing your profile. So if there’s a lot of Anthony Parks out there, if you say your name enough times in your profile, you’ll rise above them in the search too.

ANTHONY: There’s that German physicist, Anthony Park, he’s like my doppelganger. Okay, I wanna be respectful with your time, Donna. Thank you so much for hopping on but before you go, can you quickly share with us what it’s like, what are the first steps to get started working with you for anyone who’s interested in just getting started?

DONNA: If you have a very small budget but you recognize how important this is, you can go to Barnes & Noble and you can purchase my for dummies book, it’s there, it’s easy. If you have a little bit more of a budget, I have a DIY video eCourse that it’s me, talking to you just like this and walking you through the different steps of really optimizing that profile. If this is something that you really see as this is an investment in you and your future and what you can, just your earning potential, we then have services and our services are actually, really, I think reasonable and very affordable but we have three levels of service. Our pricing and all of our service descriptions are written right on our website. So if you go to linkedin-makeover.com and you hit the green button that says Click Here to Get Started, you’ll see it but basically, I get you partnered with one of my branding specialists, they’ll interview you, they’ll talk to you, they’ll take that information, they’ll put it into an amazing LinkedIn profile, they’ll give you a chance to look at it, then they’ll upload it and then they’ll review it and edit it with you and get it to final and before you know it, you’re gonna find that things start to happen.

ANTHONY: You heard it here. Just follow up, get the book, take the course or contact Donna directly and just get started. I mean this is your career, this is your earning potential. This is huge. Donna, thank you again so much. What’s the best way to get in touch with you, we already talked about linkedin-makeover.com. What about social, what’s the best way to reach out to you on whatever platform?

DONNA: I’m kind of active on LinkedIn.

ANTHONY: We guess.

DONNA: You can find me on LinkedIn. I’m also pretty active on Twitter. Those would be the two best places for me and of course, you can always just old-fashioned, pick up the phone, call me, I’m here. People are always surprised when I pick up but I do. I guess I’m old-school in that way but yeah, just reach out, you can even check out my website and you’ll have my email is there as well as my phone number.

ANTHONY: Donna, thanks again so much for taking the time. You’ve delivered just so many valuable insights, really, really appreciate it.

DONNA: Anthony, thank you so much for having me.

ANTHONY: Everyone else, thanks for listening. Make sure to visit Donna’s website. At the very least, use those free tools, get to know what she has to offer. Otherwise, don’t forget to hit subscribe. Go to anthonyspark.com to make sure you’re on our email list for regular updates and exclusive offers. Talk to you later, take care.